Tracey Thorne

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Tracey Thorne is a British photographer and cyanotype artist whose image-making explores colonial histories connected to Jamaica and acts of visual resistance in Britain. Through an artist-led research practice, she uses photography as a means of archival repair and reflection on the enduring legacies of British colonialism.

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Biography

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Tracey Thorne (b.1971) grew up in a small rural mining community in Cornwall and has lived in Birmingham since the late 1980s. Her background in social documentary work informs a long-standing interest in place, memory, and social history. In recent years, her practice has expanded internationally—particularly in Jamaica, where familial connections through her daughter’s paternal heritage have deepened her research into Britain’s colonial past and its contemporary resonances.

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​Artist Statement

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Tracey Thorne works primarily with digital photography and the cyanotype process. Her practice is rooted in place—urban and rural—and shaped by lived experience. She often photographs contemporary protests, graffiti, hand-painted signs, and other visual expressions found in the public realm. These acts of marking and messaging connect to wider histories of collective struggle, resistance, and survival.

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Her work explores how spaces—whether streets, landscapes, or archives—carry the traces of human activity, memory, and conflict. Early projects focused on graffiti and urban writing in Birmingham, shaping her understanding of the relationship between visual culture and resistance. Over time, this has expanded into deeper explorations of land shaped by colonialism, extractive industries, and environmental change.

Through photography, Tracey examines the material and emotional richness of place, often focusing on layers of text, language, and absence within the landscape. Working with contemporary photographs, found objects, and archives, she seeks to uncover neglected or silenced histories. In this way, her image-making becomes a form of archival repair—an attempt to reframe dominant narratives and recover connections between people, land, and memory.

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Her most recent project, Intended for Jamaica, explores Birmingham’s colonial trade links to sugar plantations in Jamaica, reflecting on how the city remains connected to sites of historic enslavement. She is currently a postdoctoral student at Falmouth University’s Institute of Photography, undertaking a practice-based PhD that extends her research into archival repair and Jamaica. Her thesis, Repairing the Cyanotype Archive: Anna Atkins, Colonial Landscapes and the Politics of Memory, continues her focus on decolonial image-making.

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Tracey also continues her long-term visual culture project Hand-Painted Jamaica (begun in 2017), influenced by graffiti art (as a sub-culture) and additional work on her ongoing series on British protests.

 

She has exhibited work in the UK since 2017 and is the recipient of several artist awards.

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